Taking Refuge Beneath Memory’s Gaze

WITH its mature trees, shaded benches and bubbling fountain, Straus Park has always exuded an air of refuge.

The mood at this neat little triangle, which sits at the intersection of 106th Street and West End Avenue, is only emphasized by the memorial to the park’s namesake, Isidor Straus. A former congressman and a co-owner of Macy’s, he perished on the Titanic in 1912. His wife, Rosalie Ida Straus, perished with him, having refused to leave his side for the safety of the lifeboats. A bronze statue of Memory reclining languorously on her side, one dainty foot dangling over the edge of a marble bench, commemorates this act of love.

But the very qualities that make this park attractive to the harried pedestrian during the day make it popular with a very different crowd at night: the homeless.

While the park has to some extent always been a dormitory for the homeless, many local residents say they have become far more noticeable of late, both in the park at night and panhandling in the surrounding streets by day.

The author André Aciman, who has lived near the park for 25 years and is a member of the group Friends of Straus Park, says the situation has become “major, big time now, much more so than in the Giuliani years.” And he adds, “If you go in to the park at the right time, you’ll see them all preparing their beds, picking a bench.”

Things are worse on Broadway, Mr. Aciman said: “You walk a block and three people will come at you at once. Not mugging you, but making you feel very uncomfortable. I’m much more careful when and where I sit outside now.”

According to statistics from the city’s Department of Homeless Services, the number of the city’s street homeless, as they are called, actually declined 13 percent from last year, to an estimated 3,800. But that figure is disputed by some advocacy groups.

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Librado Romero/The New York Times

“Our sense is that street homelessness has indeed gone up in the past couple of years,” said Patrick Markee, the senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless. “We’ve seen a significant recent increase in the number of people using our free food distribution resource in the Bronx and Manhattan, for example.”

Perhaps the person with the deepest knowledge of the park’s daily comings and goings is John Olund, who has tended its plants and shrubs almost daily for the past decade. Mr. Olund regularly hauls out the mounds of cardboard and garbage — and, on several occasions, mattresses and tents — left by the park’s overnight visitors. He sees no sign of a decrease in the homeless.

“It’s certainly not got better,” he said. “But it’s changed. There’s now a whole new set of people than there were five years ago. I like to think the old ones have found a home or shelter, or something, but I don’t know.”

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A recent nocturnal visit to Straus Park revealed one lone figure asleep on the stone bench beneath Memory, along with several other benches lined with cardboard, one with a sleeping bag atop the cardboard, its edge carefully pulled back as if in a hotel. Rats scuttled across the pathways and rustled in the garbage bins.

Inside the subway station across the street, a half-dozen homeless people slumped on benches. A red-faced man with a shock of white hair, who gave his name only as Doug, said he had slept in Straus Park about a dozen times.

From April through August, he said, he was largely left alone by the authorities. “Then, boom!” he said. “Suddenly the parks police started moving us on.” In July, Mayor Bloomberg had announced a citywide push to get homeless people permanently off the streets and into an array of housing alternatives.

Doug does not regard the city’s larger and chronically overcrowded shelters as an option, in part because he worried about the threat of violence. The smaller so-called “supportive housing” options, he said, were unavailable to people like him.

“I have problems with depression and alcohol,” he said, “but I’m not mentally ill. The problem is you have to be really schizophrenic to get treatment. Otherwise it gets harder and harder.”

For now, Doug plans to spend the night either in the local subway stations or in Straus Park. “The worst thing is the lack of rest down here,” he said. “At least in the park, you can sleep awhile if you’re lucky.”